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An online "hacktivist" group that calls itself Anonymous has claimed responsibility for hacking into email accounts of Swedish government in response to the seizure of world renowned The Pirate Bay website and server by Swedish police last week.

Apart from Sweden government officials, the Anonymous hacktivist group also claimed to have hacked into the government email accounts of Israel, India, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, and revealed their email addresses with passwords in plain-text.

The Anonymous group also left a message at the end of the leak: "Warning: Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year to all!! Bye :*"

The hack was announced by Anonymous group on their official Twitter account. The tweet also shared a link of Pastebin where leaked data has been dumped with the list of the emails. The tweet reads:

"BREAKING: Emails from Swedish government were hacked in retaliation for the seizure of servers of The Pirate Bay http://pastebin.com/cxmiUSJD" (pastebin removed at the time of writing).

Last Tuesday, an infamous Torrent website predominantly used to share copyrighted material such as films, TV shows and music files, free of charge — The Pirate Bay went dark from the internet for almost half a day after Swedish Police raided the site's server room in Stockholm and seized several servers and other equipment.

The piracy site remained unavailable for several hours, and appeared back online in the late hours with a new URL hosted under the top-level domain for Costa Rica (.cr). However, some torrent users said that the downloads were neither properly working, nor were free of charge, some said that The Pirate Bay service with .cr domain came by a different group, while others referred to it as a scam.

At the moment it is unclear how the group got access to the login credentials of several countries government officials and which server they exactly belong. However, this is not first time, Swedish internet giant Telia was attacked on December 12 following The Pirate Bay raid, reported by The Local.

At the time, the online services by Telia were affected as well as user connections were disturbed, RT reported. Also a chief security researcher from Kaspersky Lab, David Jacoby, said the attack on Telia was a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack and was likely a response to the seizer of The Pirate Bay in Stockholm by Swedish police. The company also encountered cyber attacks on both December 9 and 10 as well.

However, The Pirate Bay has previously been shut down number of times and had its domain seized, prompting the BitTorrent site to change its top level domain many times.

Earlier in September, The Pirate Bay claimed that it ran the notorious website on 21 "raid-proof" virtual machines, which means if one location is raided by the police, the site would hardly took few hours to get back in action.